Oscar García-Johnson is professor of theology and Latino/a studies, also having previously served as Fuller’s chief of diversity, equity, and inclusion and associate dean for Centro Latino. An experienced minister and church planter, he is the author and editor of numerous works, including his current ongoing series Teología del Nuevo Mundo, a revolutionary multivolume exploration of decoloniality, Christian doctrine, intercultural theories, and practical theology to shape the global Christian citizen of the 21st century.
Jerome Blanco: The current state of North American theological education appears to be characterized by a particular yearning for hope. Can you describe for us the contemporary landscape of theological education, here and beyond, and what makes hope such a salient element of the work of seminaries like Fuller today?
Oscar García-Johnson: I’m going to begin by using the word “hopeless.”
In the contemporary Global South, and more widely in world Christianity, traditional theological education is increasingly seen as irrelevant and hopeless, unable to address today’s global challenges. This crisis, rooted in the contradiction between Western-centric theological norms and the diverse, global spread of Christianity, highlights the obsolescence of Western theological frameworks in postcolonial and post-Christendom contexts. This fundamental displacement of Western theological discourse underlies many broader issues, including recruitment and retention challenges in theological institutions, a disconnect between churches and seminaries, and a lack of relevant scholarly contributions. These problems, mirrored in both Western and Latin American contexts, point to a deeper issue of theological irrelevance, a concern raised as early as the 1960s by Liberation theologians.
Modern theological education, with its colonial and civilizing ethos, has failed to adapt to the fluid and counter-imperial nature of the gospel, which originated in diverse, ancient Mediterranean societies. The shift of the Christian church from a marginalized, resisting entity to an official part of empire structures has led to a loss of the gospel’s core values of diversity, resistance against injustice, and compassion. This gap between the “logic of Pentecost” (Acts 2) and the “logic of Babel” (Gen 11) underscores the significant paradigm shift in Christian existence. Despite attempts to modernize or consumerize theological education, these efforts have fallen short in capturing the transformative ethos of the nonconformist gospel.
The Western-centric approach to global missions has failed to resonate with the diverse human experiences in postcolonial territories, leading to a perpetuation of colonial dynamics. The historical imposition of Western forms of discipleship and Christianization has often overlooked the needs and cultures of colonized peoples, resulting in ambiguous and sometimes damaging representations of Christ that favors an elite. Consequently, theological education has struggled to be contextually relevant, failing to empower locals as agents of transformation in their own environments. Recognizing this crisis and the limitations of Western perspectives is the first step toward fostering a more inclusive and effective theological education that resonates with diverse global experiences against the backdrop of hopelessness.
JB: What does a movement toward hope look like for theological education amidst these realities?
OGJ: Let us be frank here and admit that hope is the gospel of the oppressed, dispossessed, and persecuted, and of those aligned on their behalf. Those of us feeling healthy, wealthy, safely protected by the laws of our governments, empowered to be ourselves, to tell our successful stories, in relative economic stability, and envisioning a future horizon where our progeny and legacy will thrive, do not need a gospel of hope but a gospel of status quo. Indeed, most of us living under these privileged conditions would rather struggle for a gospel of conservation and preservation.
We in the West need to acknowledge that our provincial and local experience of God is not universal and applicable everywhere in the world. We need to acknowledge that God is everywhere, beyond the West, working with people in their own languages, ethnicities, localities, experiences. As the majority population of the world lives under conditions of poverty, political instability, some kind of war (military, drugs, gangs, religious, human trafficking, etc.), lack of basic infrastructures, and survival modes, we cannot expect people to relate to God as we would in the West.
But let me be clear here. This idea of the “West” as the “land of milk and honey,” where none of these miseries happen, is a fiction and is dangerous because it creates the basis of a civilizing gospel leading to Western duplication. Nevertheless, this fiction exists in real time and place and possesses human bodies and imaginations. It has money, power, privilege, and an agenda of expansion and preservation through whatever means possible. In the context of this Western fiction of affluence, power, privilege, and prosperity, we must begin with a question: “What is, Christianly speaking, our true location in the world?”
The first thing we all need to do, and what theological education can help us achieve, is to truly get to know ourselves in the reality of God’s kingdom—that is, our social location. Self-awareness should precede any task or role we undertake in the name of God. And then, whatever role God calls us into will have to happen in relationship, namely, being next to and learning from others, especially those individuals and communities we may think of as different. This isn’t the old apologetic way of learning another person’s language to show them that they don’t have God. This is an approach of a humble disciple of the Spirit, moving outside one’s own framework, learning with the people, and discovering that truth is much more distributed than we, individually or collectively, may be willing to admit. This allows for authentic exchange without dominating or being dominated by our colonial fictions. When we acknowledge our ignorance and are willing to offer it as an opportunity to embrace each other’s knowledge of God, selves, and creation at large, there is a chance that hopelessness may transform into hope.
JB: Are there examples of this hopeful movement that you’re describing? Even as such a posture is something we should move toward, are there already instances of this being done well that can help shape our imagination?
OGJ: I see many examples across the Bible. But we need to enter the multidimensional scriptural world to grasp it. In other words, we must acknowledge our own hermeneutical lens in our own context, the biblical horizon in its own context, and the Spirit of God’s agency in making us aware of both contexts, plus the unfolding realities brought to us by the kingdom of God happening daily and everywhere.
In the biblical historical world, Christianity is not dominant but marginal and unfolding; several scholars have even argued that Christianity was not a religion per se until the fourth or fifth century AD. So, let’s begin with that. Perhaps the first thing we need to do is adopt a marginal positionality when reading and practicing biblical truths. For example, think of how the gospel was shared in Cornelius’s house (Acts 10). You see a paradigm of the gospel being shared with the powerful from the margins. You have God’s Spirit redrawing the plans and architecture of the missional enterprise. You have the unfolding of Christianity touching the ends of the world and bending colonial realities to allow for the life abundant promised by the crucified and resurrected Messiah of Nazareth.
Today, there are examples all over: independent churches in Africa, indigenous churches in Latin America, multiple expressions of Christianity in Asia. Churches are living their life and faith in particular ways. In the past, we have called these “syncretistic Christianities.” I would not use that term, because syncretism has been used as a negative and derogatory label. I call it synthesis, or sometimes, “original Christianities.” They emphasize, “We bring with us our experience with the land, with our culture, with the wisdom of our ancestors, with our reading of the Bible, with our encounter with Jesus. Jesus has been with us since long ago—not just when we received the Bible. God has been here all the time—the creator, omnipresent. God has been part of our experience. Perhaps our languages and metaphors are different and do not convey the same literal meaning one may see in the Western translations of the Bible. And this may give the impression that God is disguised in several of our concepts, practices, and aspirations. But why not the other way around? To what extent has the Western translation of the Bible disguised the Creator to the point of non-recognition, hence requiring a larger-than-the-West translation to fully know the Creator and Healer of the world?”
God has been participating with multiple communities. Exchanging our experience with other groups around the world is the Christian way. It’s a world Christianity in which the West is one part of the experience. There are different communities beginning to operate on that understanding. But it’s difficult for us in the West, as we’ve thought of ourselves as being chosen by God and by history to be the carriers of the truth. I don’t have any desire to deny agency to the West, but if we can be more careful to say we have been a vessel and we have had an experience of God, among many other experiences of God, then we can have a conversation.
The question I have for institutions of theological education like Fuller is, how will we be more multilingual to house the challenges of world Christianity? By multilingual, I mean being welcoming of and speaking the language of multiple theologies, multiple ecclesiologies, multiple discourses, multiple cultures. What would it take to become a theological education institution where many worlds fit?
JB: Can I turn that question back around to you? What would you say is a first step reshaping theological education in this way?
OGJ: Our first task is the work of embracing ignorance and impotence as educational values. We have knowledge limitations, geographic and geopolitical limitations, cultural and contextual limitations, and yet many times Western theological institutions function as if they have the knowledge, the capacity, the funds, and the networks to teach anybody, anywhere, anything, anytime. The biggest problem is epistemic for us. We are houses of the episteme (knowledge) and yet we do not know what we do not know.
I think a second task is the work of building and rebuilding trust among faith communities and global networks by discontinuing the production of terminal knowledge—killing knowledge. Since global crises exceed the knowledge and capacity of the West, global educational partnerships must be the essence of theological education. Western theological education has been deemed by many global critics as the premier engine of knowledge-making in the colonial and civilizing projects of the Christian church since day one of colonialism. In the past, our Western systems of classification allowed us to say, “These are sinners and savages. And these are pious, truly human, and civilized.” This is what we mean by “terminal knowledge.” Now, we have come to a profound crisis of declassification and reclassification, and the first thing we need to do is declassify and reclassify ourselves in a way that is congruent with our own history and our own geopolitical realities. It is important to position ourselves because how we see each other depends on where we are located. When we do, we increase our global and our local awareness—or what I call “glocal” awareness. This is step number one in strategically positioning ourselves as global partners.
Then, from this glocal awareness, we move toward glocal engagement, glocal resistance, and glocal re-existence. As we declassify and reclassify, we’re going to see that we have built connections, and we’ll recognize that what they can see over there I cannot see over here. We’ll begin to see there are things we can do together. And when we go there, we learn from them. It’s an exchange, a transnational embrace, if you will.
When we identify each other’s struggles, we ask, how do we resist together? Here is where we rethink theological education. The topics that have been so important for the West are now going to be transformed into subjects that fit the very practical problems of people in their own localities. Different localities need different curricula.
Becoming a global theological institution means working with local communities that will change our curricula to the degree that they can be faithfully practical. It’s a great exchange. Knowledge as resistance means unlearning and relearning biblical truth that creates local beauty and life, grounded in the very communities that are distributed in and around the world. It’s intrinsic, native, organic, and always in conversation with biblical truth—recovering a central reading of the Bible as social and rooted in community. When that happens, we may begin to see the fruits of glocal re-existence—we begin to exist as a new creation, epistemically retrained, communally rewired, missionally rerouted. Here, but not yet, we are forming an eschatological community, the beloved community of the Spirit.
JB: This is a hopeful vision. But I’ll admit, it sounds like difficult work. For a task both so large and so relational at its core, it is inevitable that failure will happen along the way. How would you speak to the reality that we will at times fall short? What encouragement do you have as we strive toward this hope?
OGJ: Yes, I started with the word “hopeless.” Indeed, it feels like that. It can be fatiguing to imagine how we’re going to get there, how we’re going to do all these things at the same time, because it’s not one thing or another; it’s all happening simultaneously. Welcome to the postcolonial, postmodern world in which we now live! Welcome to the many centuries of struggle of the peoples of the Global South who have endured in spite of multiple genocides, ethnocides, epistemicides, femicides, etc. And here we are, in a catastrophic moment ecologically, missiologically, and theologically. We’re in a crisis that demands we reinvent ourselves. We don’t have any model of the future, which sometimes seems as a requirement in Western educational circles in order to move forward. But the Global South and diasporic communities have memory, experience in surviving, resiliency, and imagination. I take very seriously the words of Jesus as registered in the Gospel: “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly” (John 10:10b). A full-scale plan of the future has never been the way of the Christian witness but a political distraction (Acts 1:6). Discerning the times with theological memory, spiritual resiliency, and eschatological imagination, however, is more likely the Christian way across the centuries.
We’re asking, what does it mean to live in shalom, in justice, and in equity? And what happens when experiments go wrong? Well, I don’t think failure was a preoccupation that paralyzed first-century Christians. The mission and vision of first-century Christianity was one of sharing how they survived, and imagining a future when they didn’t have to survive but could thrive. They weren’t very concerned about how to execute a great experiment by way of reason. It was intuitive and urgent—Spirit-led. I tend to be pragmatic in the face of great threats. One of my sayings is: We will do whatever we can with what we have at hand in light of what we have in front of us, guided by God. And we will keep at it until we know better or God tells us otherwise. It will take all we are and have—and a little extra—to make it through, personally and institutionally. I guarantee you that. But I take very seriously when I hear Jesus saying: “Sell all that you have and distribute to the poor . . . come, follow me” (Luke 18:22)
Jerome Blanco (MDiv ‘16) is editor in chief of FULLER magazine and FULLER studio.
Oscar García-Johnson is professor of theology and Latino/a studies, also having previously served as Fuller’s chief of diversity, equity, and inclusion and associate dean for Centro Latino. An experienced minister and church planter, he is the author and editor of numerous works, including his current ongoing series Teología del Nuevo Mundo, a revolutionary multivolume exploration of decoloniality, Christian doctrine, intercultural theories, and practical theology to shape the global Christian citizen of the 21st century.
Jerome Blanco: The current state of North American theological education appears to be characterized by a particular yearning for hope. Can you describe for us the contemporary landscape of theological education, here and beyond, and what makes hope such a salient element of the work of seminaries like Fuller today?
Oscar García-Johnson: I’m going to begin by using the word “hopeless.”
In the contemporary Global South, and more widely in world Christianity, traditional theological education is increasingly seen as irrelevant and hopeless, unable to address today’s global challenges. This crisis, rooted in the contradiction between Western-centric theological norms and the diverse, global spread of Christianity, highlights the obsolescence of Western theological frameworks in postcolonial and post-Christendom contexts. This fundamental displacement of Western theological discourse underlies many broader issues, including recruitment and retention challenges in theological institutions, a disconnect between churches and seminaries, and a lack of relevant scholarly contributions. These problems, mirrored in both Western and Latin American contexts, point to a deeper issue of theological irrelevance, a concern raised as early as the 1960s by Liberation theologians.
Modern theological education, with its colonial and civilizing ethos, has failed to adapt to the fluid and counter-imperial nature of the gospel, which originated in diverse, ancient Mediterranean societies. The shift of the Christian church from a marginalized, resisting entity to an official part of empire structures has led to a loss of the gospel’s core values of diversity, resistance against injustice, and compassion. This gap between the “logic of Pentecost” (Acts 2) and the “logic of Babel” (Gen 11) underscores the significant paradigm shift in Christian existence. Despite attempts to modernize or consumerize theological education, these efforts have fallen short in capturing the transformative ethos of the nonconformist gospel.
The Western-centric approach to global missions has failed to resonate with the diverse human experiences in postcolonial territories, leading to a perpetuation of colonial dynamics. The historical imposition of Western forms of discipleship and Christianization has often overlooked the needs and cultures of colonized peoples, resulting in ambiguous and sometimes damaging representations of Christ that favors an elite. Consequently, theological education has struggled to be contextually relevant, failing to empower locals as agents of transformation in their own environments. Recognizing this crisis and the limitations of Western perspectives is the first step toward fostering a more inclusive and effective theological education that resonates with diverse global experiences against the backdrop of hopelessness.
JB: What does a movement toward hope look like for theological education amidst these realities?
OGJ: Let us be frank here and admit that hope is the gospel of the oppressed, dispossessed, and persecuted, and of those aligned on their behalf. Those of us feeling healthy, wealthy, safely protected by the laws of our governments, empowered to be ourselves, to tell our successful stories, in relative economic stability, and envisioning a future horizon where our progeny and legacy will thrive, do not need a gospel of hope but a gospel of status quo. Indeed, most of us living under these privileged conditions would rather struggle for a gospel of conservation and preservation.
We in the West need to acknowledge that our provincial and local experience of God is not universal and applicable everywhere in the world. We need to acknowledge that God is everywhere, beyond the West, working with people in their own languages, ethnicities, localities, experiences. As the majority population of the world lives under conditions of poverty, political instability, some kind of war (military, drugs, gangs, religious, human trafficking, etc.), lack of basic infrastructures, and survival modes, we cannot expect people to relate to God as we would in the West.
But let me be clear here. This idea of the “West” as the “land of milk and honey,” where none of these miseries happen, is a fiction and is dangerous because it creates the basis of a civilizing gospel leading to Western duplication. Nevertheless, this fiction exists in real time and place and possesses human bodies and imaginations. It has money, power, privilege, and an agenda of expansion and preservation through whatever means possible. In the context of this Western fiction of affluence, power, privilege, and prosperity, we must begin with a question: “What is, Christianly speaking, our true location in the world?”
The first thing we all need to do, and what theological education can help us achieve, is to truly get to know ourselves in the reality of God’s kingdom—that is, our social location. Self-awareness should precede any task or role we undertake in the name of God. And then, whatever role God calls us into will have to happen in relationship, namely, being next to and learning from others, especially those individuals and communities we may think of as different. This isn’t the old apologetic way of learning another person’s language to show them that they don’t have God. This is an approach of a humble disciple of the Spirit, moving outside one’s own framework, learning with the people, and discovering that truth is much more distributed than we, individually or collectively, may be willing to admit. This allows for authentic exchange without dominating or being dominated by our colonial fictions. When we acknowledge our ignorance and are willing to offer it as an opportunity to embrace each other’s knowledge of God, selves, and creation at large, there is a chance that hopelessness may transform into hope.
JB: Are there examples of this hopeful movement that you’re describing? Even as such a posture is something we should move toward, are there already instances of this being done well that can help shape our imagination?
OGJ: I see many examples across the Bible. But we need to enter the multidimensional scriptural world to grasp it. In other words, we must acknowledge our own hermeneutical lens in our own context, the biblical horizon in its own context, and the Spirit of God’s agency in making us aware of both contexts, plus the unfolding realities brought to us by the kingdom of God happening daily and everywhere.
In the biblical historical world, Christianity is not dominant but marginal and unfolding; several scholars have even argued that Christianity was not a religion per se until the fourth or fifth century AD. So, let’s begin with that. Perhaps the first thing we need to do is adopt a marginal positionality when reading and practicing biblical truths. For example, think of how the gospel was shared in Cornelius’s house (Acts 10). You see a paradigm of the gospel being shared with the powerful from the margins. You have God’s Spirit redrawing the plans and architecture of the missional enterprise. You have the unfolding of Christianity touching the ends of the world and bending colonial realities to allow for the life abundant promised by the crucified and resurrected Messiah of Nazareth.
Today, there are examples all over: independent churches in Africa, indigenous churches in Latin America, multiple expressions of Christianity in Asia. Churches are living their life and faith in particular ways. In the past, we have called these “syncretistic Christianities.” I would not use that term, because syncretism has been used as a negative and derogatory label. I call it synthesis, or sometimes, “original Christianities.” They emphasize, “We bring with us our experience with the land, with our culture, with the wisdom of our ancestors, with our reading of the Bible, with our encounter with Jesus. Jesus has been with us since long ago—not just when we received the Bible. God has been here all the time—the creator, omnipresent. God has been part of our experience. Perhaps our languages and metaphors are different and do not convey the same literal meaning one may see in the Western translations of the Bible. And this may give the impression that God is disguised in several of our concepts, practices, and aspirations. But why not the other way around? To what extent has the Western translation of the Bible disguised the Creator to the point of non-recognition, hence requiring a larger-than-the-West translation to fully know the Creator and Healer of the world?”
God has been participating with multiple communities. Exchanging our experience with other groups around the world is the Christian way. It’s a world Christianity in which the West is one part of the experience. There are different communities beginning to operate on that understanding. But it’s difficult for us in the West, as we’ve thought of ourselves as being chosen by God and by history to be the carriers of the truth. I don’t have any desire to deny agency to the West, but if we can be more careful to say we have been a vessel and we have had an experience of God, among many other experiences of God, then we can have a conversation.
The question I have for institutions of theological education like Fuller is, how will we be more multilingual to house the challenges of world Christianity? By multilingual, I mean being welcoming of and speaking the language of multiple theologies, multiple ecclesiologies, multiple discourses, multiple cultures. What would it take to become a theological education institution where many worlds fit?
JB: Can I turn that question back around to you? What would you say is a first step reshaping theological education in this way?
OGJ: Our first task is the work of embracing ignorance and impotence as educational values. We have knowledge limitations, geographic and geopolitical limitations, cultural and contextual limitations, and yet many times Western theological institutions function as if they have the knowledge, the capacity, the funds, and the networks to teach anybody, anywhere, anything, anytime. The biggest problem is epistemic for us. We are houses of the episteme (knowledge) and yet we do not know what we do not know.
I think a second task is the work of building and rebuilding trust among faith communities and global networks by discontinuing the production of terminal knowledge—killing knowledge. Since global crises exceed the knowledge and capacity of the West, global educational partnerships must be the essence of theological education. Western theological education has been deemed by many global critics as the premier engine of knowledge-making in the colonial and civilizing projects of the Christian church since day one of colonialism. In the past, our Western systems of classification allowed us to say, “These are sinners and savages. And these are pious, truly human, and civilized.” This is what we mean by “terminal knowledge.” Now, we have come to a profound crisis of declassification and reclassification, and the first thing we need to do is declassify and reclassify ourselves in a way that is congruent with our own history and our own geopolitical realities. It is important to position ourselves because how we see each other depends on where we are located. When we do, we increase our global and our local awareness—or what I call “glocal” awareness. This is step number one in strategically positioning ourselves as global partners.
Then, from this glocal awareness, we move toward glocal engagement, glocal resistance, and glocal re-existence. As we declassify and reclassify, we’re going to see that we have built connections, and we’ll recognize that what they can see over there I cannot see over here. We’ll begin to see there are things we can do together. And when we go there, we learn from them. It’s an exchange, a transnational embrace, if you will.
When we identify each other’s struggles, we ask, how do we resist together? Here is where we rethink theological education. The topics that have been so important for the West are now going to be transformed into subjects that fit the very practical problems of people in their own localities. Different localities need different curricula.
Becoming a global theological institution means working with local communities that will change our curricula to the degree that they can be faithfully practical. It’s a great exchange. Knowledge as resistance means unlearning and relearning biblical truth that creates local beauty and life, grounded in the very communities that are distributed in and around the world. It’s intrinsic, native, organic, and always in conversation with biblical truth—recovering a central reading of the Bible as social and rooted in community. When that happens, we may begin to see the fruits of glocal re-existence—we begin to exist as a new creation, epistemically retrained, communally rewired, missionally rerouted. Here, but not yet, we are forming an eschatological community, the beloved community of the Spirit.
JB: This is a hopeful vision. But I’ll admit, it sounds like difficult work. For a task both so large and so relational at its core, it is inevitable that failure will happen along the way. How would you speak to the reality that we will at times fall short? What encouragement do you have as we strive toward this hope?
OGJ: Yes, I started with the word “hopeless.” Indeed, it feels like that. It can be fatiguing to imagine how we’re going to get there, how we’re going to do all these things at the same time, because it’s not one thing or another; it’s all happening simultaneously. Welcome to the postcolonial, postmodern world in which we now live! Welcome to the many centuries of struggle of the peoples of the Global South who have endured in spite of multiple genocides, ethnocides, epistemicides, femicides, etc. And here we are, in a catastrophic moment ecologically, missiologically, and theologically. We’re in a crisis that demands we reinvent ourselves. We don’t have any model of the future, which sometimes seems as a requirement in Western educational circles in order to move forward. But the Global South and diasporic communities have memory, experience in surviving, resiliency, and imagination. I take very seriously the words of Jesus as registered in the Gospel: “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly” (John 10:10b). A full-scale plan of the future has never been the way of the Christian witness but a political distraction (Acts 1:6). Discerning the times with theological memory, spiritual resiliency, and eschatological imagination, however, is more likely the Christian way across the centuries.
We’re asking, what does it mean to live in shalom, in justice, and in equity? And what happens when experiments go wrong? Well, I don’t think failure was a preoccupation that paralyzed first-century Christians. The mission and vision of first-century Christianity was one of sharing how they survived, and imagining a future when they didn’t have to survive but could thrive. They weren’t very concerned about how to execute a great experiment by way of reason. It was intuitive and urgent—Spirit-led. I tend to be pragmatic in the face of great threats. One of my sayings is: We will do whatever we can with what we have at hand in light of what we have in front of us, guided by God. And we will keep at it until we know better or God tells us otherwise. It will take all we are and have—and a little extra—to make it through, personally and institutionally. I guarantee you that. But I take very seriously when I hear Jesus saying: “Sell all that you have and distribute to the poor . . . come, follow me” (Luke 18:22)
Jerome Blanco (MDiv ‘16) is editor in chief of FULLER magazine and FULLER studio.
Jessica ChenFeng, associate professor of marriage and family therapy, and Daniel D. Lee, dean for the Asian American Center, reflect on developing the holistic well-being of Asian American communities.
